Now a giant in the tech world with over 5 million hosts offering properties to guests, Airbnb is a coveted place to work.
Interview competition is high at Airbnb. Airbnb reviews over 15,000 applications per month.
This is likely because of their great benefits, including a remote-first, work-from-anywhere policy!
If you interview at Airbnb, you'll go through several tough rounds of interviews, assessments, and meetings with hiring managers and future teammates.
Airbnb cares deeply about their unique mission of connection and belonging, so they’re careful to only hire people who really fit their values.
Below, we break down the Airbnb interview process and top Airbnb interview questions you should expect to answer.
Airbnb Engineering Manager Interview
Airbnb Product Manager Interview
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview
What is the Airbnb interview process?
The interview process is challenging, but Airbnb states that candidates should expect an interview process that’s just like working there—“both rigorous and fun!”
The Airbnb interview process usually lasts from three weeks to three months, but it’s typically fast-moving between each round.
Many candidates hear back from Airbnb in just a few hours after a successful interview round.
The Airbnb interview process typically involves:
- A call with a recruiter;
- A technical challenge, or a screening call with a hiring manager and peer;
- An on-site interview with multiple rounds.
The first call is a fairly standard, short phone call with a recruiter.
The second round varies depending on the role you apply for. While engineering roles do a live coding challenge, other technical roles receive a take-home challenge to complete, and other roles have phone interviews in the second round.
The final round at Airbnb involves an on-site made up of multiple interviews with various stakeholders.
After a successful on-site, expect to receive an offer quickly—within a few days or a week.
Step 1: Recruiter Phone Screen
Regardless of role, each Airbnb interview process starts with a recruiter phone screen. Expect this call to be 30–45 minutes.
Prepare to answer how you’ve demonstrated Airbnb’s core values in your previous work. The recruiter will ask basic questions, including:
- Tell me about yourself.
- What are the company’s four core values?
- How do the core values apply to you?
While the call is mostly focused on behavioral questions, prepare to discuss your resume and answer domain-specific questions, too.
These are Airbnb's core values:
- Champion the Mission: We’re united in partnership with our community to create connection, which enables belonging.
- Be a Host: We're caring, open, and encouraging to everyone we work with.
- Embrace the Adventure: We’re driven by open curiosity, hopeful resilience, and the belief that every person can grow.
- Be a Cereal Entrepreneur: We’re determined and creative in transforming our bold ambitions into reality.
Step 2: Technical Screen
The technical screen will vary based on the type of role you apply for.
Engineering roles
Engineering roles will get a HackerRank technical challenge to complete within 45 minutes.
Airbnb’s coding challenges are medium to hard.
And your code has to run, because Airbnb doesn’t accept pseudocode.
Non-coding technical roles
Non-coding technical roles will get a take-home technical challenge to complete within a few days.
You’ll also have to explain your take-home challenge with a short slide presentation.
Non-technical roles
Non-technical roles will have calls with a hiring manager and a peer in the same role you’re interviewing for.
Prepare answers around domain knowledge for the hiring manager, and for the peer call, prepare to answer behavioral questions that assess your soft skills—team fit and culture fit.
Step 3: On-Site Interviews
The last round of interviews for Airbnb is an on-site interview at an Airbnb campus.
The on-site lasts about a day and includes at least three 1-hour interviews.
The on-site rounds cover technical, domain knowledge you can expect in the role you applied for, as well as a behavioral final round for all roles.
Step 4: Hiring Decision
At Airbnb, the final decision is made by the hiring manager.
Even though you interview with various stakeholders throughout the process, the hiring manager gets the biggest say.
As with all rounds, you should hear back from Airbnb after your on-site interview pretty quickly. You can expect to hear back within the week.
What are the top Airbnb interview questions?
Here are some questions Airbnb candidates reported getting asked in recent interviews.
Remember that Airbnb cares deeply about their core values.
You’ll get asked about them throughout your interview loops, too.
Behavioral
- Why do you want to work at Airbnb?
- Describe a time when you went above and beyond your job description.
- Tell me about a time when an employee gave you negative feedback.
- How do you negotiate with vendors?
- Describe your management style with examples.
- How have you made others belong?
Coding
- Give me an example of an engineering project you worked on recently.
Here are some common types of coding problems in Airbnb interviews:
System Design
- Design Airbnb search.
- Design Airbnb wallet.
- How would you build a chatbot service for the Airbnb platform?
- Share an example of a system you think is poorly designed.
- Tell me about past system design projects you’ve worked on.
Data
- Improve Airbnb’s recommendation algorithm to guests.
- How would you analyze the effects of a major change to a product if it were not possible to run an A/B test?
- How would you go about designing a metric for customer service calls?
- Assume an important metric goes down. How would you investigate the causes?
Machine Learning
- How would you design a recommendation system for Airbnb?
- Describe the steps to deploy a machine learning model to production.
- Propose a machine learning solution to predict guest cancellations.
- Tell me about past projects you’ve worked on.
- Tell me about a difficult past machine learning project.
Product Management
- Assume you’re the PM at Airbnb. How would you increase bookings?
- How would you change the perception of hotels on Airbnb’s platform?
- Tell me about a time you disagreed with Engineering.
- What do you think are Airbnb’s biggest risks?
- Name three common problems guests have with their houses and what Airbnb can do to improve them.
Airbnb Interview Loops Explained
Here's what to expect in each interview type at Airbnb.
Behavioral
Culture fit is really important at Airbnb. The behavioral rounds at Airbnb begin with your first interview—the recruiter phone screen—and continue to the final round.
Prepare for behavioral questions with specific anecdotes.
Have at least one story that showcases how you, both personally and professionally, exemplify Airbnb’s four core values, as well as their mission statement, "To create a world where anyone can belong anywhere."
Coding
Technical screen
Airbnb's coding rounds are difficult. Expect the coding challenges to be medium to hard. And prepare to run code, since Airbnb doesn’t accept pseudocode. Coding challenges at Airbnb are often an algorithm challenge, so be sure to practice these ahead of time.
On-site
Expect at least two technical coding rounds at your on-site. The on-site coding interviews are led by leaders in software engineering and cross-functional teams you’ll work with. The technical interviews are more coding challenges, typically focused on algorithms and data structures.
System Design
For the on-site Airbnb system design rounds, expect whiteboard questions, with open-ended questions involving designing complex, scalable systems that are part of an Airbnb product or feature.
Get to know Airbnb’s products ahead of time to prepare.
The system design round is about thought process and decision-making as much as it’s about the final design, so remember to be clear in your explanations.
Practice for the system design rounds by studying up on the following system design concepts:
Remember to consider:
- Structure: Do you take a systematic approach?
- Comprehensiveness: Does your approach cover all requirements?
- Feasibility: Is your answer practical and could be implemented?
Machine Learning
The skills needed for machine learning interviews at Airbnb overlap with coding and system design rounds.
Airbnb wants ML engineers who can build and deploy ML models as well as handle traditional coding and engineering tasks.
Technical screen
Airbnb ML interviews include a take-home technical challenge—most likely an algorithm coding challenge.
You need to complete the challenge and then also create a short presentation explaining your reasoning and choices.
On-site
At your first on-site ML round, prepare to present your take-home challenge to an interview panel.
At the next round, prepare for another technical challenge, but in person, which assesses your skill of ML implementation.
You’ll most likely get asked a whiteboard problem featuring a current Airbnb product asking how you could use ML to solve the problem.
Lastly, prepare to explain an ML project in-depth that you worked on in the past to demonstrate your domain knowledge for the role.
Airbnb's ML Projects:
- Categories: ML system powering Airbnb’s Categories feature, which suggests broad groups of stays to users who don’t yet know where they want to go.
- Chronon: Declarative feature engineering framework developed by Airbnb.
- Home prioritization: Using ML to determine which stay aspects are most important to users and then ranking stays with those features higher in search results.
- Also get to know Airbnb’s non-ML features and how ML could be applied to them.
Data
Technical screen
Airbnb’s data technical challenges often involve a data analysis problem where you recommend changes to an existing Airbnb product.
Prepare by studying the Airbnb product and identify any data problems they might face. You’ll also need to create a short slide presentation explaining your reasoning, findings, and code from the technical challenge.
On-site
The data rounds on-site consist of three interviews lasting between 45–60 minutes each.
The first is a technical interview where you present and explain your take-home challenge to a panel. Prepare to discuss a past data analysis project you’ve worked on as well.
Your second interview will be with the hiring manager, where you present a solution to a mini-case study.
Product Management
Technical screen
Airbnb product management candidates have two 30-minute technical screening calls.
The first call with the hiring manager focuses on your resume and domain knowledge, as well as one product case study.
The second is a peer call focused on more behavioral questions, as well as goal-setting and execution.
On-site
Airbnb’s product management on-site rounds consist of two interviews conducted by leaders in product management and cross-functional teams you’ll work with.
For the first round, you give the presentation you completed ahead of time. For the second round, prepare to discuss role-specific questions and product case studies.
Airbnb Interview Tips
What should you know before your interviews start?
Airbnb prioritizes culture fit.
Airbnb cares about domain knowledge and experience for every role, but behavioral knowledge is just as important because they want employees who are passionate about their mission of creating belonging.
To prepare for this, practice behavioral questions for each round.
Airbnb’s technical assessments are challenging.
Airbnb wants the best talent, so they give technical challenges aligned with that goal.
Prepare thoroughly for the technical challenges in the second round of your interview because the challenges are intentionally difficult.
Airbnb expects you to know the in’s and out’s of their company and product.
Airbnb asks interview questions that involve Airbnb business- and product-specific questions.
They expect you to know their product inside and out in order to work there, so don’t just study broad domain knowledge, but practice for Airbnb-specific questions.
FAQs
How difficult are Airbnb interviews?
Airbnb interviews are challenging. The competition is steep, with over 15,000 applicants a month, and with multiple rounds, your interview process could last a couple weeks up to a couple months. You’ll need to prepare in order to move on at each round and land the job.
How do I stand out as a candidate at Airbnb?
Airbnb’s behavioral rounds are really important. Know Airbnb’s core values and have specific stories ready for each interview to prove you’ve demonstrated each value in your previous work experience.
More Airbnb Interview Prep Resources
Exponent has extensive resources to prepare you to feel your best when it comes time for your interview at Airbnb:
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